General Boards > Redecorating and Updating your Motorhome
New Beaver look/ MCD Shades
Orman Claxton:
Hi Jim
Installer told me today that shades will only go down to a preset position ( where ever I want it,) This is for driving only
Shade will only lower ALL the way IF the ignition switch is in the off position .
Orman Claxton:
Well, shades were completed yesterday, WOW,What a difference,,
Shades can be programed to stop at any location while driving ( Ignition on)
Instructions are in the Manual you rec.
Keith Oliver:
Sorry that I didn't see this thread when it was active. My excuse, I was visiting Daughter and Granddaughter in Paris.
I had MCD shades installed in Palm Desert in March. I postponed dealing with the valences until the summer, so that I could do a proper job. Well, I am in the midst of that right now.
I bought Alder at the hardwood wholesaler in Vancouver. I bought a better planer here on Saltspring Island. I now have one completed valence, the first window I selected was the passenger side bedroom. It turned out ok, so I could go ahead with the rest. I have reduced all of the big wood I purchased to smaller pieces. I have rounded the edges that needed rounding, put decorative grooves where they belong, and have almost all the pieces cut to finished size. Now I am in the process of removing all of the existing blinds and valences, painting over the vinyl paper, filling the tears and holes, etc. If anyone ever tells you this is a small job, you will know they haven't done it.
Before leaving Palm Desert, I went aboard a friend's Foretravel and took some pictures of the valences. Likewise a high end Monaco. Mine are not a copy, I just adapted some of the ideas that gave me.
I will post pictures once I am done. At the present rate, that will be at least a couple of weeks from now.
The biggest surprise so far was finding the horizontal piece that the windshield shades and valence attach to is bowed. Need to adapt to the curve. I don't think my alder is that bendy, as the valence is 5.75" tall at that location.
Keith Oliver:
To update on my valence project:
I had to leave the project for a week, due to some business, but I am back at it. I found a bulge in the wall below where the valences sit, but decided that, since I was planning to repaint in any event, I could cut into the bulge and determine whether I could flatten it. Well, that didn't go well.
Beaver built these coaches with an aluminum box tubing frame. They infilled between the tubing runs with white styrofoam and covered the whole with 1/8 plywood, inside and outside. Because there were some places they wanted a more secure fastening of the plywood than just to the styrofoam, there are some softwood 2x2s, to which the plywood is stapled. Around the windows there may also be some 1/2 plywood, depending where the nearest aluminum box tube is.
The bulge I opened was caused by water getting into the wood, both the 2x2 and the plywood, and rotting it. The particular location is between the two big windows on the passenger side. I eventually found the source to be the top of the window ahead of the table, under the Girard awning, and the leak actually went upwards through the plywood covering, to the underside of the aluminum, along to between the windows, and down to the floor, filling the space between the vertical aluminum and the white styrofoam, a space of about 4" in which I found a mess of soggy black mush that used to be a 2x2 and a 2x 1/2 plywood. At the bottom, just above the floor, the thin plywood covering the inside of the wall was letting the water out onto the floor at a slower rate than it had been coming in, so the cavity acted like a water glass, the bits of rotting wood I pulled up out of there were actually dripping wet.
There were other places that the wallpaper was lifting, which I now treated as "suspicious", so I attacked them all with a chisel. I found some wetness is a few other spots, but nothing like the first spot.
The reason this problem exists is that in the original build, Beaver used the cheapest grade of 1/8 plywood for the covering of both sides of the walls. The glue isn't water proof, so as soon as it gets damp, the plies separate and the plywood turns into a sponge. To top it off, there is nothing done to make the window openings waterproof. They should have been covered with a layer of epoxy, or even a layer of caulking.
The inside of my coach is starting to look better now, as I have cleaned and dried all the places that I opened up, then I put new 1/8 ply back on where I had taken the bad stuff off, and am in the process of painting and filling. When that repair is done, I can get back to the valences.
I have another valence completed and ready to go in, and all of the rest of the wood ready for assembly, but I have to go back to Vancouver tomorrow for about a week, so won't be finishing this project any time soon.
Keith Oliver:
After some false starts, my valences are almost done. The last one is in the shop getting its last coats of varnish before going up. I have done 10 of 11 windows as they all got the MCD blinds in the springtime. The galley already had a wood valence, so I didn't change that one...yet. The windshield turned out to be on a perfectly straight piece of the aluminum frame of the coach, it was only the padded vinyl that made it appear curved initially. The new valence over the windshield was actually the simplest, as it is composed of only one piece of wood, attached with pocket drilled screws, up into the aforementioned framing. The most complicated was the driver's window, as the distance from the glass to the side of the dash was only 2", and all of the valences were being made 3 1/2" deep. This required some creativity, and I settled on making the front facia of the valence taper as it desended from the top to bottom. This piece also had to be just over 7" wide at the bottom, tapering to 3" wide at the top, to align with the angled front of the driver's window. This valence also had to disappear behind the TV boc, so couldn't be pre-assembled, but had to be attached to the wall and ceiling piece by piece.
I will try to get some pictures up over the next week, once the last valence is installed.
The project stalled when I was preparing the walls to take the new valences. I found that the original build of the coach interior was done by lining the entire interior of the coach, before any cabinetry was installed, with 1/8" 3 ply with a vinyl covering. All of the cabinetry was then installed, attached through this thin wallcovering, into the aluminum framework. The window openings were unprotected from water intrusion, and intrude it did. Most of the 1/8 ply around the driver's window was completely rotten, as was that between and below the two curb side large windows. In fact, the water had started lifting the flooring between those windows. When I started digging out the rot, I got all the way through to the outside fibreglass between the two curbside windows before it was all gone. The windows had to come out, the delamination of the outside fibreglass had to be fixed, and the openings had to be made watertight. I was/am appalled at the lack of attention to protecting the window openings in the original build. I used blueskin before re-installing the windows that I have fixed. The others will get blueskin when I have time, but as they don't appear to have leaked, as yet, I can leave them till I am south this winter. The "great workmanship" of Beaver relied on one thin piece of butyl tape between the outside edge of the windows and the fibreglass skin of the coach to keep out the water. This was adequate for a number of years, but there was no thought given to where the water would go should that gasket fail, and they always fail. Once I got rid of the rot and put the walls back together, it was time to get away, so we downed tools and went boating for the summer. I returned to the valence project when we returned at the end of August.
Watch this space for pictures of the finished project.
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